CHAPTER III
AIRS AND GRACES
Certain types of humour—Elegant variation—Inversion—Archaism
—Metaphor—Repetition—Miscellaneous.
certain types of humour
SOME of the more obvious devices of humorous writers,
being fatally easy to imitate, tend to outlive their natural
term, and to become a part of the injudicious novice's stock-
in-trade. Olfactory organ, once no doubt an agreeable substi-
tute for 'nose', has ceased to be legal tender in literature,
and is felt to mark a low level in conversation. No amount
of classical authority can redeem a phrase that has once
reached this stage. The warmest of George Eliot's admirers,
called upon to swallow some tough morsel of polysyllabic
humour in a twentieth-century novel, will refuse to be comforted
with parallel passages from Adam Bede* Loyalty may smother
the ejaculation that 'George Eliot knew no better': it is
none the less clear to him that we know better now. A few
well-worn types are illustrated below.
a. Polysyllabic humour.
He was a boy whom Mrs. Hackit had pronounced stocky (a word that
etymologically, in all probability, conveys some allusion to an instrument
of punishment for the refractory).—eliot.
Tommy was a saucy boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence,
and excessively addicted to humming-tops and marbles, with which
recreative resources he was in the habit of immoderately distending
the pockets of his corduroys.—eliot.
No one save an individual not in a condition to distinguish a hawk
from a handsaw .. .—Times.
And an observer of Miss Tox's proceedings might have inferred so
much without declaratory confirmation.—dickens.
But it had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be